Category Archives: science

Yes, we love this Internet

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When Norway’s national anthem starts with the words “Ja vi elsker dette landet” (yes we love this country) most people probably think of the landscape.  It is not all that bad either.  But I love the Internet here too.

17. May is Norway’s Constitution Day. While some countries celebrate their independence day as a national holiday, our National Day is celebrating our constitution. (The third in the world, if I remember correctly.) Our actual independence came almost a century later, but at that point it was just a formality.  Norwegians had implemented our constitution piece by piece during over 90 years of union with Sweden, until there was nothing left but a shared king. Since the king has no actual political power, it was a pretty painless change. Kids today barely know what our Independence Day is (June 5) but everyone is sure to remember 17. May 1814.

The Swedes may be less happy about our independence now, since we have quite a bit more money per head than they.  This is fairly new, however. When I was a kid, the Swedes were still richer.  They probably did not much mind that their poor cousins had to fend for themselves.  But then oil and gas were discovered in the North Sea, and soon the money came flowing in. And like most other countries with such an unexpected windfall, we spent it all and then some.  And then the crisis hit.

After the previous boom, a generation ago, there came a crash which left oil almost worthless.  The price we got for it was less than it cost to pump it up. Suddenly Norway wasn’t so rich anymore.  Widespread unemployment, plummeting property prices, the usual.  But luckily we had only been rich for a decade or so.  We still remembered how to live without that extra money. So we pulled back and pulled together.  Tax money from those who still had jobs was used to buy the banks that failed, and extend the loans for those who had lost their job.  Eventually the crisis blew over, as they tend to do.  When the oil price rose again, it was decided to put most of the income in a fund and only use a little each year.

Because of the fund, we know there won’t be a sudden money crisis. Even if there is a global recession, like now, we simply use some of the savings and continue living like normal. And because this is so, people and businesses can plan far ahead and don’t need to make bad decisions in a spate of panic.  This has the unexpected side effect that society simply works more efficiently. Norwegian productivity is very high.

An unexpected side effect of high productivity and small differences in income is that everyone wants fast, clean Internet.  OK, not everyone, but most.  And where there is a demand, there is a supply.  And no, it is not even state-owned. But we have better Internet than the country that invented it.  I know this because I played City of Heroes again today, an online role playing game. And while American players whined about lag and crashes, it ran just fine here, even though the servers are actually in America.  However, some of them are on the East Coast, which means they don’t have to go through much of America to get here.  Otherwise they would probably be slow here too.  Because in America, the Internet is in bad shape.  Kind of like the roads, and the schools, and… well, those who live there probably know it much better than I do.  But I bet you wish you had used your Golden Age to build up some funds too.

Big pharma or small minds?

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I’m biking too… just more slowly. ^_^

In my somewhat medical entry earlier this week, I portrayed the lung specialist as an incarnation of Big Pharma.  Even as a snapshot of the moment this is not quite as nuanced as my real feelings, and in perspective even less so.

Then again, regular readers will know that I cannot even use the phrase “Big Pharma” without irony, for it is a concept typical of a very different subculture.  It goes along with a thinking that is not just mythical, but pure fantasy firmly believed to be literal truth.  It is a mainstay of progress haters, vaccine dodgers and people who think everyone can get the green light at the same time with no ill effects. And of course envious socialists, who cannot abide the thought that someone may earn money on other people’s illness.

While I eagerly support people’s right to choose shamanism and witchcraft over modern medicine, I am torn about seeing them expose their children to the same experience in applied Darwinism, and I definitely require them to wear a plague flag in public.  As for the Socialists, their intentions are as always good; it is just their realism that is faulty, as usual. Having worked for the State for 30 years, I know that it has great perseverance but very limited creativity. If you rely on the State for medical progress, you better have a long natural lifespan.

With incorporated pharmaceutical companies, of course, the problem is sometimes the opposite:  Things go entirely too fast.  I personally think there should be more nuance to this. When it comes to treatment for illnesses with a high mortality (including most cancers), side effects should not really be a major concern.  Is it really a problem that 5% die from the treatment if 95% die without it?  But the opposite is the case for what I would call “convenience medicine”.  It is unacceptable to have people die from low-level painkillers, for instance, or breast transplants for that matter. There should not be the same rules for these opposites.

***

In any case, do not mistake me just because of my brevity.  I don’t see doctors generally or this particular lung specialist as just greedy salespeople.  I know enough health personnel to realize that most of them are driven, deep down, by a deep urge to help others.  In general, they are better people than me, in the motivations for their work.  (Although I am working on that.) As the Russian journaler Coldheels (I think it was) wrote:  A medical student dissects many frogs not because her heart is cold but because it is warm with love.  (Sorry to mangle the quote, but it has been 10 years.  Feel free to correct me, but I know I got the spirit of it right, because I feel that way too.)

So I do not want to cast aspersion on her motivations.  But she does live and work in the middle of a milieu of “better living through chemistry”.  She went through a long checklist of diagnosis, certainly more advanced than the script of a McDonalds worker, but still very much a script.  Who has written it?  What are the assumptions you make while following it?  It never occurred to her to ask:  “You are a 51 year old man and you are not overweight, but you are not exactly muscular either.  Are you keeping in shape by exercising regularly, or are you simply not eating as much as others?”  (And I did not interrupt her to tell, although to my defense it was only minutes since I thought I would be treated for a chronic throat infection or some such.)

The point for that deviation from the script would be when there was no improvement in my lung function 15 minutes after taking a standard bronchidilating drug.  Hmm… reduced lung function but not disastrously low, no response to common drug, none of the common allergies… childhood asthma….  could it be that this guy simply has spent 45 years meticulously avoiding any strenuous activity, to the point where his lungs simply never grew to the same capacity as the average male?

While I do seem to have some degree of exercise-induced asthma, it is entirely possible that most of my reduced lung capacity as shown by the test simply comes from a life of slow motion, of walking fast but never running, biking but not too fast, always making sure to not get winded.  What does that do to a human lung?  How much is genetics and how much depends on practice?  I know my heart is beating as slowly as an athlete, but I am not an athlete. The heart speed seems to be genetic – in fact, I get the impression that my brother is even more that way than I – but that does not mean lungs follow the same pattern.

I would like to have such thoughts at least considered before committing my only body to a treatment that may be utterly pointless.  (And taxpayer money for the foreseeable future, since this is Norway  and we have socialized health care that Obama can only dream of.)

Not being able to think outside the script is obviously worse if your script is a medieval fantasy, but even a scientist is not immune.  We need to broaden our minds and see things from an ever higher perspective.  This is the path of true progress.

Brainwaves, entrainment & meditation

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Last year I wrote several entries about brainwave entrainment and the two products I have bought and used for this purpose, first Holosync and later LifeFlow. I have tagged this entry with the same tags, so you should be able to use the tag feature of WordPress to quickly get a list of the other entries where I have used those tags.

This is a more basic overview, for those who are absolutely new to this field.

Our brain uses a combination of electricity and chemistry to do its work. Signals traverse the neurons – the nerve cells – as a change in the electric potential. Then in the gap between cells, it is converted to a chemical signal carried by a neurotransmitter. If the receiving cell reacts, it more or less recreates the signal and passes it on. Whether it does this, and whether the signal is stronger or weaker than it first was, depends on other signals the cell may also receive, and its experience with signals from that particular cell.

As you may guess by now, measuring the electromagnetic output of the brain will not allow your doctor to read your thoughts. It can only give a rough outline of what is going on in there. In fact, it is different from an EEG (electro-encephalogram) to say whether a person is dreaming or just thinking hard. But certain conditions show up very clearly, such as an epileptic attack or, on the other hand, sleep.

In sleep, the brainwaves slow down. For historical reasons, the usual thinking waves are called beta. They are quick, jagged and don’t go very far up or down usually, though there may be an occasional spike.

The next type is alpha. This appears when we are about to go to sleep, but also during daydreams and other relaxing situations. You can usually create this type of brainwave by simply sitting comfortably alone, closing your eyes, relaxing and then looking slightly upward inside your closed eyes. Don’t roll them back so hard it hurts. In this state of mind it is almost impossible to solve mathematical or logical problems, or anything else that normally requires concentration. These brainwaves are slower, rounder and more regular.

The alpha state is the one where we start doing meditation. However, the alpha brainwaves are not the meditation. This is extremely important to understand. Why then do we use this state of mind? Because 1) this is something every person experiences every day when they go to sleep and often throughout the day as well, and 2) it is a state of mind where consciousness is somewhat reduced. As I said, you cannot do mental work in this state. Most people will automatically start daydreaming (autists don’t) and their thoughts begin to drift aimlessly. Meditation consists of setting up an anchor (a mantra, a simple sequence of counting, observing your breath or something similar) and binding your awareness to it so it does not drift. Over a period of months or years, you gradually learn to remain fully conscious in a state of mind where you normally are not conscious. This is what meditation really is about: The expansion of consciousness.

Below alpha waves (frequency 12-8 Hz) are theta waves (7-4 Hz). These fill most of the night. Just after you fall asleep, or when you nap on the sofa, you remain vaguely aware of the world around you, even though your brain has already begun to produce mostly theta waves. In this situation you can still be easily roused, but you rather prefer not to unless there is some crisis. However, when you return to the same brainwaves after going into deeper sleep, this awareness has been erased, and you remain more or less unconscious throughout the night. In the elderly, some nights there is no deeper sleep, and they may therefore imagine that they have not slept at all, even though they did so for several hours.

The final level is delta (2-0.5 Hz). The brainwaves here are very slow (0.5 Hz means each wave takes two seconds!) and with a much greater amplitude (that is to say, the electric potentials on both sides are much higher). This is the deep sleep that wipes out the awareness of the mind. It is also associated with restoration of the body and brain, maintenance of the immune system and release of Human Growth Hormone.

All of these states can be induced through brainwave entrainment. You can use light or sound, sound being most used because it has no risk of triggering epilepsy. The human ear cannot hear sounds with a frequency this low, so it is made indirectly. The most popular approach is binaural beats. You need headphones for this, as it sends a different signal to each ear. The difference in frequency becomes the frequency of the resulting brain waves. For instance, a tone of 210 Hz and one of 200 Hz will give rise to a 10 Hz wave in the brain. This was discovered rather by accident. Later other methods have been devised that don’t need headphones, the most effective is probably isochronic tones. Here an audible signal is turned on and off (or from one frequency to another) at a rapid interval that corresponds to the target frequency.

With these techniques it is possible to invite the brain into brainwaves normally only found in sleep. You cannot overwhelm the brain and force it into these states though. On the way from the top of the brain stem where these frequencies are generated from the sound input, the waves have to pass through the limbic system. If this system is aroused (through intense emotions such as fear, anger or lust) the signal will be blocked. Conversely, if you willingly relax and don’t concentrate on anything else, the signal will spread more quickly.

If you play a track designed to cause theta or delta brainwaves, it is normal to fall asleep the first times you listen to it. In fact, if you don’t mind, you may continue that way. But if you strive to be alert, you will normally be able to stay awake longer and longer, and eventually throughout the session.

LifeFlow by Project Meditation takes a slightly different approach, as you get 10 tracks, one for each Hz of frequency from 10 to 1. You are supposed to spend at least a month with each, until you are thoroughly familiar with them, starting with those you recognize from waking life, and getting steadily deeper. This way you should be able to remain conscious even at the lower levels, though it may usually take a couple years for a newbie to get there.

Again, the essence of meditation is the expansion of consciousness. A host of problems in life stem from the fact that our “normal” consciousness is a fragile thing. A simple insult may be enough for it to be swapped out temporarily for an altered state in which you behave like a total stranger. The same goes for hunger, fear, lust or revulsion. Because of this, people find themselves unable to reach their life goals or even to maintain the life they already have. Seen from the perspective of someone more stable, they are like foam on waves on a storm sea, thrown helplessly about, broken apart and formed again, but doomed to once again be ripped to shreds. Anyone who has a deep and stable consciousness is certain to feel compassion when seeing this sorry state of being, but most people are sure this is as good as it gets, this is all there is.

I believe this is how some of the world’s great religions came into being, through the compassion of great souls who had a deep, stable consciousness. But because people tried to understand it without doing the practice (in other words, because of “theology”) the religions degraded into cheat codes for getting health, prosperity and generally tricking the gods into ignoring your destructive behavior and treating you as if you were someone else. As opposed to, you know, becoming that other person, from the inside out.

There is a distinct risk that the same may happen with brainwave entrainment. Already the claims made by various suppliers go a ways beyond what you should reasonably expect. But you should definitely expect some benefits if you use it regularly.

Our 3 bodies & their sleep

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Is this physical body my true form? Well, probably more so than a unicorn (your unicorn may vary), but it is not the only body. In a manner of speaking.

You may be unaware that you have (at least) 3 bodies. I did write about it last year when I worked my way through the ILP book, but you may not have been there, or it may not have made a deep impression on it, perhaps because you have been busy taking care of your family and have not had time to stare intently at your own soul.  (Or navel, though chances are you won’t find your soul there. But at least your navel may remind you of just how much you owe your mother. Hopefully staring at your soul will remind you of your celestial Parent as well.  But not while your own kids are starving. Or, more likely, pulling each other’s hair out.)

So, as I try to say, you can verify this by observing yourself. Or you can just take it on my stubbly face value, because I am going on to the next point. Follow if you dare.  For I venture into the land of sleep.

I said Saturday that dreams are the realm of the subtle body, or at least so say the sages.  The subtle body (or “energy” body) is conscious in your dreams, but you are not conscious of being conscious.  Not very much, at least.  You may still be able to remember fractions of your dreams, if you take the time and strive to memorize them and put them into words before they disappear.

It is possible to have one’s waking consciousness while dreaming. This is called “lucid dreaming”.  This is largely a matter of training (doing reality checks at set points in waking life until you start doing them in your dreams), although it may also become inevitable given enough meditation or similar practices.  However, the lucid dreaming that comes from technique is often used for wish fulfillment, whereas the lucidity that follows from meditation is a passive observation.

This passive observation even takes place in the deep, dreamless sleep.  This sleep is said to be the domain of the “causal body”, which we may also call spirit body.  The individual human spirit (or spirit-soul, as opposed to the mind-soul usually studied in psychology) is the lowest level of us that can be differentiated from the Divine, as far as I know.

((I say this from the perspective that humans are an epiphenomenon of the Divine, somewhat like waves arise from the sea and are not separate from the sea, but the sea is different from the waves and does not have the properties of waves that make them waves.  But that’s just how I see it right now; don’t bet your eternity on it.))

Even if you are a goddamning atheist, you still spend some time in deep, dreamless sleep.  Unless you are old, you do so each night, although the time spent in such slow-wave sleep is fairly short in adults and keeps shrinking with age. This is the deepest, most restful sleep, but strangely it is also when sleepwalking and night terrors (not nightmares, just a formless fear) occur.  In this deep dreamless sleep there is still a kind of knowledge, a faint awareness. Awareness not of name or person, and not of memories of the past.

In a sense you can think of meditation as exercising this “causal body”. As you make progress in this, after some years (decades usually) you start to have a witnessing awareness at all times.  This witnessing awareness is the nature of the causal body.  Usually it is so faint that you don’t really notice it in everyday life, except as a fundamental notion that you are the same person even though your body has exchanged nearly all of its atoms, even though your hopes and dreams have changed, even though your loves and hates have changed, even though your political affiliations have changed, even though your religion has changed.  You are still there, observing all that happens, quietly, silently. This internal “I am” is the most we usually notice of the causal body, but in its field of consciousness all phenomena arise and pass.

As the connection, or identification, with the causal body grows stronger through meditation or other spiritual practices, you may start to experience the same kind of awareness during deep sleep.  I don’t do that, though it happened once by accident. Only a few people have come that far, and they tend to not sleep a lot anymore anyway, as they don’t need it that much.

As I have mentioned, I usually spend some time in delta brainwave entrainment in the morning.  (Delta waves are the slow waves associated with dreamless sleep.) I am for the most part not conscious during that time, although that is what it was originally meant for.  I guess I am just lazy. I use it to induce dreamless sleep in the morning, when such sleep does not occur naturally.  It only happens at the very beginning of the night naturally. But even though I am not awake, I am sometimes present to the degree that if dream fragments arise – pictures or drifting thoughts – I turn them away and go back to the silence.  This is a practice of meditation, where we do just that, detach from images and thoughts. To myself I call this “meditative sleep”. I am not sure if it can happen without entrainment, but I mention it for context.

I hope this was of a little interest.  I suppose I may also mention that according to the Japanese religion “Happy Science”, when you die you wear an “astral body” that looks and feels like the one you used to have. But after some weeks, it has become more idealized.  If you died from wounds, they will heal; if you died from old age, you will grow younger, and you will start wearing your favorite color.  But when you move on upward, you lay off the astral body as well, and ascend in just your soul.  So at the 6th dimension for instance, that is what you wear.  You are still humanoid, but your appearance is more up to you, based on your thoughts rather than just habit.  And a couple more dimensions up, you lay off even that and spend your time as merely rays of sentient energy.  Or that’s what they say.

I don’t know anything for sure about the afterlife myself.  But if we instead look at it as if we look inward in ourselves, it seems pretty reasonable.  First you have your habitual mind, which identifies with your body.  Deeper down you have the spirit-soul, the deeper individual.  And finally you have the actual spirit, which is not really human in the sense that our body is.  It is more like… well, to quote the Bible, “The spirit of a human is a Lamp of the Lord.”  In other words, it is a light source that gets its light from the Light itself.

Now, the spirit is not easily observed.  But through simple scientific meditation you can pick up the rest of the “bodies” fairly easily and within reasonable time. It is not some kind of fable.  It can be verified by anyone who bothers to take the time and keep at it for a while.  We can certainly discuss the wisdom of referring to these layers as “bodies”; I am not too comfortable with it myself, but I am a bit short of good expressions in any European language to describe them, so for now I’m sticking with it.

Land of mass confusion

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Picture from the so-called “real” world today.  Not a bad place, I guess. At least for me.

This morning I woke up before 7.  I am not built to get up at this time, but that’s what happens when I go to bed before midnight. I woke up from a dream, and in the interest of checking on the status of my soul, I tried to remember it.  I only got the last part though:

Together with a female friend, I went into a shop where I hoped to get a job, as they were looking for a new employee and I felt that I might be qualified. However, the woman in charge rejected me out of hand, because I owed them money for stuff I had bought there and not paid.  She immediately produced a paper detailing the goods and the amount.  I had no memory of this, but started to explain that I had not intended to cheat them and of course I would pay it at once.  Then I looked at the amount and did a doubletake.  It was way too high, thousands of dollars, and when I looked at the specification, there were several TVs.  I haven’t had a TV in my lifetime.  In fact, it was all consumer electronics, and the shop was a clothes shop for men. For good measure, there was no name anywhere on the paper.  It had nothing to do with me at all.

At that point, I realized that I had not been rejected for the job – I had disqualified myself.  It was a test:  If I was honest enough for the job, I would immediately have realized that it could not possibly be true under any circumstances, and would not have started to think of excuses or reasons, I would just simply have stated that it could not possibly be true.  Because I had reacted differently, they knew that I was the kind of person who had problems with money, and they could not safely hire a person like that.

By the time this all sank in, I was already awake.

So yeah, still not Heaven I guess.  Although I suppose the Hell of Rejected Job Seekers is rather a pleasant stay compared to the Hells of classic lore with their pitchfork-equipped demons and stuff like that. Still probably depressing if you stay there long – I have a good friend who is depressed and going through that experience in real life now, and I remember collecting a couple hundred rejections myself when I was young.  It wasn’t particularly pleasant in itself, but not a Hell in any meaningful sense.  At least not in Norway, and at least not to me.

The world of dreams reminds me again of the expression “Land of Mass Confusion”, which I heard in Chris de Burgh’s When I think of you, the song where he portrays an infatuated, inexperienced and quite possibly insane (or at least mentally challenged) person in love.  Of course, it is hard enough for normal people to tell infatuation and insanity apart. And in a sense, each of us is also insane every night, unless your dreams are enormously more boring than mine.

Huston Smith is also convinced that our dreams take place in a real but different plane of existence.  Our subtle (“energy”) body parts way with the gross (physical) body and goes on to have its own adventures in its home realm.  Of course I don’t mean energy in the scientific sense, but the word “energy” has been used in the other sense long before modern science.  So let us not mix these up.

Anyway, that is just one way of seeing it.  Biologically, dreams are caused by a bioelectric storm in a small part of the limbic system. As it spreads outward from there, it stirs up all kinds of activity, first in the instinctual deep parts of the brain which we share more or less with reptiles and birds, then with the emotional brain that is approximately like that of our furry friends, and finally all the way to the “big brain”, the neocortex that has our personal memories and tendencies stored.  This is also true.  But this is like looking at how electricity moves through a computer, and make conclusions from this about the nature of Windows or iTunes.  The software is not really part of the computer, and the mind is not really part of the brain, even though each of them would be pretty useless to us without their hardware.

Huston Smith points out that the impact of dreams is largely their intensity, as each dream is the first.  There is no habituation, we experience everything as if for the first time.  Even when a dream repeats, we usually don’t notice until afterwards. Inside the dream, it is still new, whether it be pleasure or terror. They take us unaware, and that is their strength. Their weakness is that they are disconnected, fragmented, unmoored.  They take us away to a land of mass confusion, and we don’t know what to say when they are there.  Like infatuation or insanity.

The same is my impression of childhood, from my memory of it. It was a time of mass confusion, but also of mass novelty.  I am probably still very childish for someone my age, but it is not as if each day is filled with confusion anymore.  But when I look around, I see confused people everywhere. Mostly the young, of course, but not only them.  Some of my best friends are confused on a regular basis. I wish I could do something about it.  I wish I could help them wake up.  But I probably need some more waking up myself first.  “The obscurely spoken is the obscurely thought” after all.

Perhaps I can say something more systematic tomorrow. Then again, that was what I thought today too.

Socialism & the gospel of Satan

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It is that time of the year again!

It is the time of the year to mock Socialism again.  Not the socialists, many of them are good people at heart.  They are just misled by a false belief. Of course, you may say that so am I.  The proof of the pudding, however, is in the eating.

As I have said before, there are two gospels in the modern world. The gospel of Jesus Christ is “IT IS MORE BLESSED TO GIVE”.  The gospel of Satan is “YOU DESERVE BETTER”.  I think it is pretty obvious what side socialism is on.

The New Testament says: If anyone has two shirts, he should share with him who has none.  Socialism says: If anyone has no shirt, he should take one from him who has two.  To the casual observer, this looks much the same:  They still end up with one shirt each.  But in one case they also end up as friends, in the other case as enemies.  When they die, the shirt remains on earth but their friendship or enmity follows them to the next world. Therefore, socialism only makes sense if you are also a materialist and an atheist in the strictest sense, who has no belief in anything higher than the world of animals.

Now, without Christianity – or something very similar – socialism could not have arisen in the first place. The shirtless would simply not have had the hope of getting that shirt, much less the conviction that they deserved it. Only if the practice of sharing shirts were common enough that people started to expect it, but not common enough that everyone actually got one, would there be room for the rise of a reverse Christianity based on forced charity.

We Christians can blame ourselves – collectively, I mean, it may not apply to you personally – for not having shared voluntarily.  If we did, back when most of the nation consisted of Christians, there would have been no room for socialism, since we would already have a more egalitarian society without the bureaucracy and bitterness that follows with an intrusive state taking on the role of God.

Even now that we are living in a partially socialist state (and I don’t think there is any nation in the world that does not fit that description anymore), we should not give in to bitterness. Otherwise we will become like those who strayed before us.  It may be that we could have used our money more wisely than bureaucrats – how much does that take, really? – but most of it is still used for reasonably harmless purposes, some even outright good and useful. The nation may have gone astray – and I would claim that it did so before it turned to the Left as it did – but we still need not have the spirit of envy in our heart.

It may not be obvious, but the “capitalist” consumer society is actually powering the Left. Day after day people’s minds and souls are filled with needless desires from the relentless onslaught of advertising.  Using every trick in the book, experts in psychology are making you feel that you need and deserve something you don’t have.  As long as there are rich people, this desire will make you envy them and wish to take what is theirs, unless you consciously choose to immerse yourself in love that gives and fasten your eyes on that which lasts beyond this lifetime.

Of course, we could just “eat the rich”, but history shows that this is not a good way for a nation to feed its populace.  When socialism is taken to the extreme, poverty ensues for the whole people. This should come as no surprise. Socialism is based on blaming the successful for your failures. When the successful are removed and only the failures remain, things are going downhill fast.

Conversely, if everyone was looking to make others happy already in this life, then the whole nation would rapidly become prosperous. Why is that? Because we would be looking out for what other people needed, and fulfilling needs is what creates prosperity. To use a worn old metaphor, baking the cake rather than dividing it.  We can neither be happy nor prosperous by everyone taking from each other, this is obvious.  But when people compete in giving the best service and the highest quality, the wealth of a nation rises rapidly.

Sure, we can compete based on greed, as long as we get to keep enough of the reward (as opposed to have to share it equally with others). But competing to do good from a loving heart makes you happier.  Try it and see for yourself. It actually is pretty blessed to give, especially when you can do it voluntarily.

Dreams of Heaven and Hell

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SERVICE WITH A SMITE! Not conductive to visiting Heaven at night, unfortunately. Or so I’ve recently discovered.

In the book “The Essence of Buddha”, Ryuho Okawa has a disturbing and thought-provoking idea. Disturbing because it is so plausible, based on the notion that Heaven and Hell are not “elsewhere” but inside us already in this life. (Christian readers may remember Jesus saying this too.) Okawa’s spiritual bomb is that you can get a good idea from your dreams about which realm you belong to.

If you dream about being happy together with other people in peaceful places, this may be a glimpse of Heaven. But if you dream of darkness, fear and violence, chances are this is what you will experience when you leave your body permanently as well. After all, your dreams are fetching their content from the depths of your own soul: It is not like you are dreaming someone else’s dream, after all. Well, unless you are the prophet Daniel, I guess.

This, regular readers will realize, is bad news for me if true. Probably. Because most of the dreams I remember from my adult life are about either a) being scared out of my skin, b) killing people in war or self-defense, or c) humiliating sexual harassment of other people. This reached its peak in my late twenties, though it continued into my journaling years to some degrees. At least there was no overlap between b and c. I would wake from a dream of grabbing someone’s breasts and feel a sense of joy that at least I had not killed anyone this night!

Over the last years I seem to dream less. This may be a sign that the hellishness is receding. You see, if I actually do dream of being happy and peaceful, I am unlikely to remember it. I wake up if I am terrified, or if extremely excited, and then it is hard to go back to sleep immediately. Therefore I will remember whatever I dreamed just before. But otherwise I tend to sleep until my sleep clock gently wakes me, and in that slow transition from sleep to wakefulness the dream fades out of reach. I may remember that I dreamed something, but not what, unless it made a great impression. This is even more so now that I spend 30-90 minutes in slow-wave brainwave entrainment in the morning. For a dream to still be remembered after this, it better be remarkable.

As it happens, I had such a remarkable dream this morning, causing me to wake up an hour before the clock. Unfortunately for your chance of hanging out with me in The Realm of the Good in some years, it was about war. I dreamed that there was a war of some kind, and we were beset by the enemies, but snatched victory from the jaws of defeat through my supernatural leadership abilities. Talk about mixed messages – but then, that is a pretty accurate representation of how I feel.

Again, it bears mention that I don’t believe any of this “because Master Okawa said so”. That would be an insult to his work, as he strives to explain logically why he thinks we can use dreams as spiritual informants. His argument goes basically: Once you accept that there is an afterlife, the law of causality ensures that it depends on this life. This law is known in Buddhism as karma, and in Christianity by the verse “as a man sows, so shall he harvest”. Unless science, Buddhism and Christianity are all wrong on the same point, the current status of your soul is a pretty good hint of where you are heading at the moment.

(Of course, a major point of religion is to be able to change your future destination, but it is unlikely to just change randomly or through applied ritual without personal transformation. What is the point of going to Heaven if you make it a Hell for yourself and all around you? And if you act and think completely differently in Heaven than here, is it really you who went to Heaven at all, or just someone else looking like you? Do souls even “look” at all, are they not defined by how they think and feel, their attitudes and the assumptions on which they habitually act? If you are bitter and suspicious here, and someone happy and grateful show up on the Other Shore, whatever happened to the real you?)

So yeah, I think the man from Venus is onto something here. Dreams can give us a chance to reflect on ourselves, dredging up feelings and memories that need to be held up toward the Light. But they are probably not representative, unless you have some method to rapidly wake you up at random times and then leave you with enough time to jot down your dreams.

Oh, and about that dream… City of Heroes‘ subscriber expansion number 17 came out yesterday, and I had fun roleplaying my new Lightwielding character, Lord Septim Silver, all evening until bedtime. We totally steamrolled the villains and had tons of fun doing it. SERVICE WITH A SMITE! So, I am not completely sure how representative that dream was…

The immortals will find you

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Mood-setting screenshot from the mostly unrelated anime 07 Ghost, where a song says (approximately): “You must cross over thousands of years worth of time.” Luckily, being immortal does not require you not to die. You just have to live eternally while you are alive, but that is more than hard enough. At least you don’t need to do it alone.

I distinctly remember writing this before, but I cannot find it with the in-journal search function, Google web or Google desktop. So just in case, I will say all the words that should be spoken, before they are lost forever.

I have earlier said that spiritual practice (such as meditation, deep prayer, chanting, lectio divina, keeping the Sabbath etc) all cause expansion of the Now. Obviously we all live only in the now, since we cannot move our bodies in the past or the future with all our willpower. But at the same time, our mind is constantly visiting the past and the future; and more than that, many alternate pasts and futures. This is useful but also dangerous, as we get spread so thin that the actual, real Now may get too little attention.

The expansion of the Now is of course utterly subjective. We still have only 24 hours a day, no matter what. The difference is how we experience those hours and what we accomplish during those hours. So if you define science as something that can be measured with instruments, then this is not scientific at all. But it is scientific in the sense that it is repeatable and can be peer-reviewed. If you do roughly the same thing, you will get roughly the same results.

One aspect of what I call “spiritual aperture science” is that when the Now is dilated (expanded, made wider, giving more room) it becomes filled with eternity, which flows into time through the opening that is Now. Again, you don’t need to believe this. All you need to do is never set aside any serious time for any kind of spiritual practice, and you are almost guaranteed to never experience any of this. In fact, it will look utterly insane to you, probably. This is as it should be. You have chosen to have no part in eternity in this life. I will not predict what happens when this life is over. I don’t remember anything of the afterlife or the beforelife. What I know about eternity is from this life. And in this life, eternity is only present in the Now. The deeper and wider the Now, the more eternity flows into it.

This, of course, is analogous to the influx of Light in my Lightwielder stories. It depends on practice and the absence of that which is contrary to it. But the real thing has another aspect again. This is the other people who lived in eternity before you. They are still there, because eternity never ends.

The words of ancient saints and sages may seem almost fossilized to those who live the fleeting moment, where the Now is just a pinprick in time. But once you start carrying around a small bubble of Now (which is also a small bubble of eternity), you may meet these words again and something unprecedented may happen. They come to life. Because you and they now live in the same dimension, the timeless Now, they can reach you in a whole new way. As Lao-Tzu said: “When you are ready, the Immortals will find you.”

Did he really say that? I am not sure. I have looked for it on Google, but found no trace of it. I remember it quite clearly, and how similar it was to the famous proverb “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” (Also: “When the disciple is ready, the Master will appear” and any combination of these two.) Perhaps I dreamed it, or perhaps I saw it in the MMORPG which is based on Daoist legend. I know that whether I actually read those words or not, they had a big impact on my life. Not so much as once, more like one of those depth charges that sink down and then go BOOM a while later.

But that is the thing with me and Lao-Tzu. Even if he never said that while alive (and I am still not sure he didn’t), he certainly said it to me. And I have still only a quite small bubble of Now / Eternity, but evidently enough that I can verify by experience that the immortals (eternals) are still there and present in a much more direct way than from the surface of fleeting time.

Also, they will find you. You cannot decide who will speak to you, well at least not in the beginning, I am not sure later. But at first they will find you. The place where I imagine I read that particular quote compared the immortals to angels. (I know that this was before I had heard of Kofuku-no-Kagaku and their tendency to use the words “angel” and “bodhisattva” interchangeably, whereas the obvious translation of “bodhisattva” would be “saint”.) In fact, the veneration of saints in Catholic tradition is clearly related to this effect. It is not a worship (although it will be if you have no idea what is going on and just try to pray to saints as if they were pagan demigods). Rather, at some point one of the saints will come alive to you, to the point where you may well have conversations, or at least certainly know how they felt.

There are no doubt specific rules, or laws of nature in the timeless domain, that decide which nonlocal operators are taking your calls. I don’t know those rules. If I ever find out, I will tell, unless I am ordered not to. Probably I won’t be ordered that way, however. The secret protects itself. Even now, if you read this and you have not dilated your Now, you won’t make heads or tails of it.

Conversely, when I read people who have this experience, even if I don’t agree with them in everything, even if I disagree strongly with them on some things, I can recognize them as soon as I catch a glimpse of this happening to them. They may express it in completely different ways, of course. It will be misunderstood in different ways depending on how you express it. But it will be understood rightly in only one way, because the Now of eternity is one.

To summarize:
-Most people have minds that run all over time, including imaginary time.
-Traditional spiritual practices cause subjective time to change, expanding the timeless Now.
-This causes a subjective experience of eternity that fills this Now. This has a number of effects.
-One effect is a heightened awareness of others who live the same way.
-Many of those people are long dead.
-To the extent that they lived in the eternal Now while alive, they still remain there.

Is that clear? Or should I just write about the weather again?

Ash cloud days

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Not exactly apocalyptic cloud.

“I am disappointed in the ash cloud” twittered an old friend. “I had expected something more apocalyptic.”

I certainly wasn’t disappointed, but I understood the part about it not being very apocalyptic. In fact, it looked like normal summer clouds, white and varying from gauzy to cottony.  I would not have known that they were made of ash (actually pulverized stone) if I had not happened to read the news.

Despite their innocent looks, these clouds can destroy the engine of planes that fly through them. Even where the ash is so thin as to be invisible when seen close up, it can still damage engines, so all planes were grounded yesterday, and most of them most of today. This will likely continue on and off through the next days as well, depending on the movement of the ash clouds. The eruption is only intensifying so far.

Our prime minister got stranded in New York and managed the country from his new iPad.  Now that’s what I call “small government”.  (That was a joke. The iPad story was true though and Apple is likely to use it for all it is worth. It will be extremely hard for Microsoft to disparage the iPad as a toy after this. Of course, I could have managed Norway from my HTC Hero. Norway is a very well-behaved country.)

According to the latest projections I have seen, a thicker ash cloud should hit us in the evening or night of Monday 19th. The World Health Organization has recommended to stay indoors if it rains, but the Norwegian government says there is no reason for that.  It will rain tomorrow here. On the west coast of Norway, it will rain very much, according to meteorologists.  (At least it is not raining meteors, despite their title.)

Norway is a very long country, made up mostly of mountains and fjords. Planes are essential for society to work normally.  In addition to people (especially from northern Norway, which does not have railroads) planes also carry most of our mail. Luckily most people use email now, so physical mail is mostly used for mail-order and some bills.

And of course our connection to the rest of the world is greatly slowed. Not that I care, since Norway is the world’s best country and I am already here. And I have enough dried plums to continue regular life for weeks yet.

Beyond mere sanity

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“You are insane” states a llama (!!) in a comment to Saturday’s somewhat controversial entry. At least it is not yet a donkey rebuking me, although I guess a llama is pretty close.

Those are dangerous words to utter, at least in the context of religion, but I cannot be too harsh: I myself once hurled the same words thoughtlessly at a better man than me. (My brother, to be exact.) Words come easy to those who do not need to make account for them before the Light, so it is anybody’s guess how serious is the llama’s concern for my mental health. Is it just a fire-and-forget missile of indignation, or do they truly care about my wellbeing? It would probably help if one knew more about their identity than just the species. But why not take it seriously? I have a lot to say about sanity. Or at least the voices in my head have…

I don’t know many insane people. A couple of them only, although I know well what is called “everyday psychopathology”: Phobias, obsessions, compulsions, projections, quirks and so on. As my father used to tell me when I was just a boy: All are mad, and he who is most sane is just the least mad. But neurosis is one thing, psychosis another. To be insane, you have to pretty much be unable to take care of yourself or at least unable to contribute to society.

Now, I don’t contribute to society genetically, so I am already somewhat dubious in that regard. But I still hold my job, and as a matter of fact, lately I have started loving it and making an effort to become better at it, thanks to the crazy cult, or perhaps thanks to the brainwave entrainment. It is hard to say since both are fairly new in my life, but I think the work thing is largely inspired by Master Okawa’s books, because I remember reading some passages there and realizing that I had completely misunderstood the role of work in my life.

But back to the concept of “mere sanity”. By this I mean that what passes for sanity is hardly worthy of being my highest aspiration, even in this highly advanced corner of the world and at this time of education and plenty.

There is, as I said, the everyday psychopathology. There is rarely a man or woman without some quirk or some disturbance that irks themselves or those around them. Some are afraid of taking the elevator or closing the door to the toilet, for fear that they may be trapped in the small closed space. Some are on the contrary afraid of crossing open places. Some are afraid of other people looking at them, some are afraid of being alone. Some are afraid of silence, some of the sounds they hear in the dark. Human ingenuity in misery is astonishing. And yet, this is not all. It is rather the tip of the iceberg.

When I look at the behavior that is socially accepted, even encouraged, sometimes lauded, I myself hardly find it worthy of envy. There I see people whose joy or lack thereof depends on whether a football team has won or lost a match, and a team where neither they nor anyone in their family is a member at that. There I see people who worry loudly about global warming, but eat mounds of beef and drive large cars. There I see those who bemoan the imperfections of their available health care, but who eat large helpings of fat and synthetic fructose and then sit down in front of the television for the evening.

Does it end there? If only! We are just warming up. There are two enormous delusions that terrorize the current civilization, off the top of my head. One, the most tragic on a personal scale, is the belief that happiness is something others are obliged to give us. This takes many forms, but basically they all amount to this: “If the other person would do what I wanted, I would be happy, but now I cannot be happy because they don’t live up to my expectations.” Of course, this is usually mutual. This is the madness against which Master Okawa and I are allies, though there are precious few others I can call on. It is obvious once you have actually experienced it that happiness comes from within, and depends mostly on our own choices.

The second, which is most tragic for the whole planet, is the insane intertwining of wealth and reproductive success. In a not too distant past, this was actually meaningful, for starvation was never far off for the common man, not to mention the common woman and child. A man who could display his potential as a provider during the next famine was the natural center of female attention. There may also have been an element of the instinct that forces the male weaver bird to spend a long time building a highly elaborate nest to impress the female: If he can do all this and still have time to eat and not be eaten by predators, he must have healthy genes, let’s come get them. This is fine as long as you are a bird making nests from branches, leaves, and discarded plastic foil. But when a highly intelligent species sets out to compete for their bare life to display the most wealth, regardless of the price in natural resources, pollution, species extinction and future environmental collapse… “Love hurts.” It hurts the whole planet.

There are of course the lesser evils I rail against: The notion that you will make friends by chewing gums and drinking soft drinks (I suppose it could happen, but listening to people and remembering their preferences is far more effective). The belief that being born on the right side of some line on a map makes you inherently superior to those on the other side. The rapid exchange of sex partners instead of taking time to cultivate true intimacy. Hell, throw in the whole porn industry, as if people did not have enough imagination or everyday life was not exciting enough. The insanity goes on and on.

I won’t say sanity is overrated. Quite the opposite. There is way too little of it. And I will take any allies I can find to make people stop and think: What the hell am I doing? Even when the “people” in question is myself.